My earliest food memory belongs not to me, but to my mother.
Half complaint, half Sunday afternoon tale, she would recount for those gathered in the living room the time my grandpa fed me so many pinto beans, I was up all night with stomach cramps. She would shake her head and give a rueful laugh. Those beans kept her up, too, probably on a work night.
Most of my good food memories come from my grandparents. And the creamy, starchy taste of pinto beans always figures prominently in those home movies of my mind.
Pinto beans are one of the “common beans,” including kidney, navy and black beans. Some theories of their origins suggest they all were derived from a common bean ancestor from South America. They likely spread through South and Central America with migrating Native American tribes, and were likely brought to Europe by Spanish explorers. The pinto or “painted” bean is the most highly consumed dried bean in the United States, according to “The World’s Healthiest Foods” book and Web site.
My family called them “soup beans,” and they were served in their liquor with raw chopped onions sprinkled on top and a slice of cornbread on the side. Leftover beans were often reheated as a side dish and served with fried chicken or fish.
The history of bean recipes in my family is long and varied. By the time I knew her, my Great-Granny Annie Lou was cooking her beans with an amazing amount of fatback and serving them with a thick cap of fat. Few in the family would touch them.
Annie Lou’s daughter, my maternal grandmother, still used fatback to season her beans, but much less of it. And she cooked hers in the pressure cooker. Grandpa, hereafter called Pop, loved to coat the cooked fat cubes in salt and pepper and eat them along with the beans. I followed his lead, smacking my lips as I scooped up the last of the broth mixed with cornbread crumbs.
I sometimes wonder how the fat back would taste to me now. In my childhood, I scarfed down canned sardines drowned in vinegar. But upon trying them again years later, I decided they were an experience best left to memory.
After my grandmother nearly died of clogged arteries on the operating table in the 1990s, mom developed a new, heart-healthy bean recipe. She still used a pressure cooker but ditched the fatback in favor of a couple of tablespoons of canola oil and a cube or two of beef bouillon. The new flavorings gave the beans an especially clean flavor.
In college, and later in my own kitchen, I mostly relied on store-bought canned beans. But over the last few years, I’ve developed my own hybrid technique based on the three I inherited.
Lacking a pressure cooker, I turn instead to my enameled cast iron Dutch oven. I use bacon, about a half-pound diced, and onions. My “soup” is mostly broth from free range, organic chickens
I always make a pound or two at a time, split the pot’s contents into quarter freezer bags, lay them flat on a cookie sheet and pop them in the freezer. The neatly-stacked bags make the perfect, quick-thawing, meal for two on a weeknight, especially when there’s also sliced cornbread in the freezer.
Just this week, I made another change to the recipe. I switched to organically-grown beans. As I picked up the bag and looked at the price tag – at $2.59 a pound they’re a dollar more than the supermarket brand — I heard my pop’s voice in my ear and saw him shaking his head about his spendthrift granddaughter.
Every dollar I got my hands on, he used to say, burned a hole in my pocket trying to get out.
“Leave it to you to find the world’s most expensive pinto beans,” he said.
“Hush,” I told him. “Wait ‘til you taste them.”
Try this recipe for ‘common beans,’ also known as soup beans…
Tags: organic, Pinto beans
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